Thursday, March 15, 2012

seed

back when a black sky awakened with the first smudge of the first orange light and continued to brighten under a newly formed sun, in an era before many words were spoken, and then later when the sentences uttered were few and guttural, and then way beyond that when, at last, there was a babel of languages—none of which could possibly be comprehended today—it flew across the land.

it careened past fiefdoms and serfdoms and dukedoms, danced over terror and famine, knowledge and expansion, sprouting famous and infamous people—kings, queens, generals, empresses, tzars, dictators, poets, prophets, tyrants—and all the lesser folk no one has ever heard of or read about in a book.

on mountains, deserts, plains and jungles it settled and lived, grew strong and insistent, lifting and spreading itself at every opportunity, seeping like mist, rising like vapor in and around every gaping crack on earth.

it flowed river-like along currents of time—air and ocean currents, too—and, most recently, sailed on wooden ships, steamships, and liberty ships and cruised on jet planes. it arrived in this place, right here where i stand on the porch in the bright, warm sunshine eating an apple and pushing a stray piece of hair out of my eyes. tirelessly it traveled and then presto!—became the me of me.

there is an emptiness on a page, a vacuum represented and magnified by the whiteness of the space.....and i begin to mess it up, get it dirty, to bring it into contact with the world in which it exists, to pollute it with laughter, injustice, loss, ambiguity, laundry, and any other thing that goes into the human experience of life. -evie shockley

the clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness. -john muir

each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprint -philip roth, american pastoral

this grand show is eternal. it is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls. -john muir